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BGP – IPv6 Peers

In this post we will explore a few variations of an IPv6 BGP neighborship. We will configure an IPv6 eBGP neighborship between two directly connected routers. The routers will advertise to each other the IPv6 loopback addresses.

1. Basic setup

A simple basic setup, where we are using the inet6 address that was configured on the interface for BGP neighborship:

2. IPv6 BGP neighborship using the link local address

Let’s make this more interesting, and imagine that we don’t know the link local address of R2 router and we don’t have access to R2 to find out the address. R2 was already configured, our job now is to configure R1 without touching R2.

We don’t know the link local IPv6 address of the R2 router, but one easy way to discover that is to check the log messages:

We can also discover the link-local address of R2 with monitor traffic interface command:

Note: other potential solutions to discover the neighbors link local address are router advertisements and trace options.

Now, because we know the link local address of R2 router, we can complete the configuration on R1:

3. IPv4 BGP peer with inet6 family

In this variation, we will configure an IPv4 BGP peer, and we will activate both inet and inet6 address families.

In Junos, ::ffff refers to an IPv4-mapped IPv6 address (e.g., ::ffff:172.8.0.2). It is used to embed a 32-bit IPv4 address within a 128-bit IPv6 address, common transition mechanisms for dual-stack routing scenarios. The simple solution is to configure the ::ffff:17.8.0.1/120 inet6 address on R1 (and similarly on R2):


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